Choose Your Avatar

By Christopher Shea

Animated avatars are becoming more and more common in online instruction, but what should they look like?

Does it help if they look like the trainees and in some ways mirror their psychology? We have mixed feelings, a new study finds.

Researchers asked 257 people to take part in a training program involving the spreadsheet Excel. They asked them some questions about their own preferred instructional style: If they were teaching someone else, would they give directions or suggestions? Would they rank trainees against other students or only against their previous performance? An avatar was then created, using a program called People Putty, that either matched the test subjects’ sex and ethnicity, or didn’t, and that matched their teaching style, or didn’t. It offered advice and encouragement from the side of the computer screen, throughout the tutorial.

To the researchers’ surprise, race and sex had virtually no effect on the trainees’ enjoyment of the training or on instructional outcomes. (The one exception: People reported less mind-wandering when avatars shared their race and ethnicity.) Matched teaching styles, on the other hand, led to stronger performance on quizzes but had no effect on engagement or enjoyment. And those things are important, too, because people will drop out of training programs they dislike, or that bore them.

The greatest influence on whether people liked the sessions and found them useful? It turned out to be the “perceived” similarity of the avatars. Oddly, this could be utterly unrelated to objective similarity. And so, rather than assigning avatars by race and sex, the researchers suggest that perceived similarity can be enhanced by means of such cues as “The avatar was designed for people just like you.”

“Similarity Effects in Online Training: Effects With Computerized Training Agents,” by Tara S. Behrend and Lori Foster Thompson, is scheduled for the May issue of Computers in Human Behavior.